And 4. The PC market is at the moment in the wait for a switch to 64 bit. It will probably take a few years before consumers have to migrate - but switching the Apple will take a similar time. So the moment they were ready on X86 they could start migrarting to X86-64.
Poor Apple developers!
Why does no mention the redirects?
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 1
Maybe he isn't after the file sharers at all. Maybe he just wants to stimulate his telecom shares. File sharers have been the driving force of the internet for quite some time.
You should publish as much as possible and as detailed as possible. Try to keep in mind that one of the purposes of your publication is to invalidate as much as possible of their claims. So:
- Don't forget the applications. Research is about general ideas while patents are about application of that technology. So if you invented the wheel, take time to describe the axis, the suspension, etc. in your publication. Also, many companies try to patent general ideas and will patent the implementation later on.
- Also mention alternatives. If you find several ways to do something: mention more then one. If you publish an alternative for some claim of them you will make their claim rather useless.
- Mention the prior art. It is good scientific practice anyway to do that, but here you may get some additional profit from it.
There is no problem if you publish about something that they have patented. Only when you start using the technology in some productive use will you become liable.
The big question is what you want several years from now. You may be able to establish a lot of prior art for their patents. But patent law is a jungle: if you are not prepared to fight you have no chance. You mention that that company has an agressive patent policy. So you can be sure that they will go to court to protect their patents even if they don't give themselves much of a chance. the only thing that can stop them is when they know that you will fight back and that you have the resources to win. This may mean that you have to look for some big corporation to back you.
If you want to start your own corporation to implement your work you should apply for some patents of your own. Not only will that impress you financial supporters. It will also be essential when dealing with that aggressive company. Without any patent of your own they can stop you with one tiny patent claim of their own. As soon as you have some patents of your own you can stop them too. In that situation you keep each other hostage and can negotiate a reasonable deal.
I would like to see the following improvements:
- if there is prior work the patent should be sent back to the applicant (with a bill) and the applicant should have to reframe the patent so that it does not cover prior work
- The above mentioned bill will not impress corporations but it will stimulate the Patent Offices to search for prior art.
- any time lost due to the fact that the patent had to be rewritten should be subtracted from the duration of the patent. (this will impress the corporations)
C# is a serious competitor for Java. Its designers have looked at Java and tried to make something better. With the advantage of the latest technical insights they surely have a chance to replace Java.
So Java needs to be updated to the newest technical insights. For end users this will make no big difference: the new runtime will know a "compatibility mode" where you can run older versions. Their only problem will be that they hveto download that newest runtime. But I guess that the compiler will have an option to generate code for Java-2 as well.
The real pain will be on the programmers who will have to adapt parts of their program.
From Computer Magazine issue 1-2003 in a test of development environments:
On advice of our lawyers we acquired an illegal copy of.NET where the EULA had been altered. They saw this as the only way to reduce our legal responsibility.
1. Where is George Bush? The US government is rather influential in this. I wouldn't be surprised if they had something at stake here too. Otherwise they would have interfered long before.
2. Harass the board with questions please! Vincent Cerf and some other board members give a lot of public lectures (and probably make a lot of money from it). If they speak near you: go to the lecture and ask the tough questions!
This study is rather predictable. They take comparable symptoms and then ask people if they really thought it comparable.
The real question is what happens in the brain.
Just some suggestions to get started:
- the Japanese study hat was recently quoted here noticed that mainly the frontal lobes got the alpha waves.
- some meditation studies notice that some parts of the brain become quiet while others become more active.
I don't know what to make from that. But I do think that further research should be in that direction.
You surely didn't read the intro of the Ars cookbook: "All recipes are from the member listed, any questions about them should be posted to the specific member. If you wish to have a recipe removed or added to the cookbook simply ask or post on the boards."
That sounds to me as NOT open source.
However, one might start with asking all the contributors if they would like to submit their recipes as open source.
In the "good old days" when Monsanto & Co still developped new varieties by crossing existing varieties they used to sell hybrid seeds that couldn't multiply (the resulting plants were infertile). Why isn't that technique used for GM stuff?
As a independent system administrator I always bought my own parts and either put them myself together or ask the supplier to do this.
The advantages were obvious:
- standard parts: Dell & Co regularly change the hardware inside their pc's without notice. So if you order a second batch of the same computer you are very likely to get something different: not what you want as a system administrator.
- quality: once I found out that a whole shipment of 6 Dells had a defect second IDE port. No problem as it was supplied - but when I added a CD-rom I had to call Dell. There they tried to stonewall me with technical questions - if I hadn't known my stuff I doubt if it would have been repaired. My second experience was with a Dell server. It came pre-installed, but when I wanted to add a harddisk to the RAID I had to reinstall it because they hadn't done it right (yes, they told me to reinstall).
- price vs performance: you can finetune the computer to get optimal price/performance: a cheap video card because an office doesn't need much, more memory because that tends to become the biggest problem in older computers, no scsi, mice and keyboards that you ergonomic people like and your favorite monitor.
It should be noted that there is one case where Microsoft has a kind of opensource: ArchT.
A little history: before Microsoft bought Visio Visio sold besides it drawing package also a cheap Autocad clone: Intellicad. At some point they decided to concentrate on the big market of the drawing package and they handed Intellicad to the Intellicad Technology Consortium (ITC). This consortium has developed the product further in a kind of opensource way (although I am not sure whether RMS would agree).
When Microsoft bought Visio Visio had yet another CAD package: ArchT. This is an architectural add-on for Autocad and Intellicad. Microsoft decided to license this to the ITC too and in this way.
However, support for ArchT never came from the ground. The ITC had only a license for Intellicad 2000 while ArchT only worked with Intellicad 98. Nowadays ArchT is nearly invisible on ITC's site. The latest news I could find was that Eagle Point will further develop ArchT.
So to summerize:
- Microsoft only used "opensource" here as a decent way to stop with the support of some software.
- As far as I can see Microsoft didn't make any money from it.
Microsofts strategy is to sell packaged their software in a nice box with a nice and good manual and lots of goodies. For the more complicated products they have made some courses and certificates too.
There is some telephonic support. But that is very basic. There is no such extensive handholding as Oracle does. For that kind of support MS relies on its resellers and other service providers.
Sure MS tries to get more money from consulting. But for now it is insignificant. It is probably the best if it stays that way: otherwise they will be seduced to make their products worse in order to get more consulting.
Most companies that provide opensource products sell them as a kind of loss leaders. They make the money on the support. For a similar strategy to Microsofts only the Linux companies like Redhat and SuSE some in the picture. And even they rely more and more on closed products and consulting.
For these reasons I think that when MS goes opensource it will be with inexpensive products that don't need much support. Preferable there should be some added value from the opening of the source.
My guess: they might do something like ID software does with Doom: giving the source of old versions away and in that way stimulate developpers to develop new ideas.
SACD has been on the market for some time - as has DVD-Audio. Both have a comparable marketshare.
Seems to me that the music industry is shooting itself in the feet with a standards war. This way it may take years before people start buying next generation CDs.
When I was a system administrator most people I worked with used Autocad and as that involves mostly working with the mouse they got their problems from the mouse.
My experiences were:
- there is a psychological part too: the people who ended sick at home were people who had given me the impression before that they were not very happy at their work.
- I had a little collection of different mouses and trackballs. If people had problems they could try them out. If they had a mouse at home that they liked we bought that one.
- a big part of many treatments is making you conscious of what is happening in your body. The thing that impressed me most was some muscle-tension-meter that you put around your arm. If you see that some of your muscles are too tense you are sure to try to relax them.
- the article thinks that it is bad that people have to relearn with a new keyboard. I think it is good. It makes people more conscious of what they are doing.
The main example provided by the Motion Picture Association is a "DVD-R factory" that produced Spider Man and Star Wars copies.
But this is not a factory with professional DVD-burners. This is just a guy who bought 30 DVD-writers at the computer shop around the corner - just as you and I could do. I am afraid that some day we will end with a unique ID on our DVD and CD writers at home just to protect the copyrights.
Just as with the prohibition in the 1930s we have here laws that are far outside acceptance by the general public. All those measures won't stop the main problem (in this case: overpriced CDs) and in fact it only helps the mob.
Content developpers are now coming in the position that inventors have had for a long time: to get maximum profit they need to keep working on it.
Clones and competitors can be a source of innovation without being a real threat if you treat them right. Just look at Microsoft and Apple. In the games world you have ID Software that actually encourages hackers to work on some of its code by releasing old sources.
Blizzard obviously dropped the ball:
- they did not or were slow to copy innovations from BNETD
- they didn't sell servers
- they didn't work out a policy towards BNETD. Now they just want to destroy them and they seem too stupid to realize that they might actually profit if they were a bit more creative.
Sure - there is the problem of the pirated copies that can play on BNETD and not on battle.net. But I doubt whether this is a real problem:
- as we all know many software packages got popular because they tolerated a certain level of pirating.
- Blizzard seemed able to live with piracy until BNETD was modified so that pirated copies of the beta of Warcraft III could be played. But to me the main problem here seems to be a lack of foresight at Blizzard.
- Blizzard has planned an effective remedy with more content on the server. No hacker will match that.
- BNETD is prepared to make include a check for the unique reistration number. I doubt that this will be very effective (it's opensource, so other people will remove it), but it may help a bit.
- if Blizzard picked up the innovations from BNETD faster that would decrease its appeal.
You suggest that giving it opensource will guarantee support. I dont think so. At its best the project will become another unmaintained project at sourceforge. Maybe it will even get on its unmaintained section (http://unmaintained.sourceforge.net/). For your customer this will bring no benefit.
And if your clients competitors get the program and find it useful: do you think they will give something back? Only if they are very moral people. Most people will simply conclude that they have no benefit from giving it back, that you - as copyright holder - won't sue them and that if they would give their code back there would simply be two versions - confusing further users.
One of the most amazing things of the WIPO contest is that all winners are from third world countries. Well, maybe not so amazing if you see the number of submissions by country: both the US and the UK had only 4 submissions while Ghana had 21! I wonder how they recruited those writers: maybe they promised some professors a trip to Geneva if they asked their students to write something.
Some URLs: the WIPO essay match was an activity of the WWA (WIPO World Academy). The winners can be found here. As far as I could see they didn't publish the other submissions.
Latin America has had a Pax Americana for over a century and it has been a big mess. There is no reason to expect it to become better in the future. To achieve that the US would have to really open its borders - just as the EU does for its new members (and the Romans did in the past) - and I don't expect that to happen.
In a normal economy you need to maintain a certain level of honesty to enable people to produce and trade things. When you have a natural resource like oil you can forget those basics and essentially do what you want. The abuse of power by the Saudi family could not happen if there wasn't the oil.
Foreign intrigants like the CIA like such scenarios. Power abusers like the Saudi's are opportunists who will do whatever it takes to stay in power. That is much preferable above democratic leaders who say that the US stinks because the big majority of the population believes so.
The best the Saudi's could do is not to build advanced industries. They did that in the past. They become white elephants that are very dependent on western technology and expertise and tend to get outdated after a few years. Instead they should focus on products for the local market. However, being a rather small market they will need to cooperate with their neighbours to make that a succes.
Slashdot Mirror
And 4. The PC market is at the moment in the wait for a switch to 64 bit. It will probably take a few years before consumers have to migrate - but switching the Apple will take a similar time. So the moment they were ready on X86 they could start migrarting to X86-64.
Poor Apple developers!
That way they can determine exactly which links I have followed. In combination with the cookies this is quite a lot of personal information.
Does Google have any privacy policy published?
Maybe he isn't after the file sharers at all. Maybe he just wants to stimulate his telecom shares. File sharers have been the driving force of the internet for quite some time.
You should publish as much as possible and as detailed as possible. Try to keep in mind that one of the purposes of your publication is to invalidate as much as possible of their claims. So:
- Don't forget the applications. Research is about general ideas while patents are about application of that technology. So if you invented the wheel, take time to describe the axis, the suspension, etc. in your publication. Also, many companies try to patent general ideas and will patent the implementation later on.
- Also mention alternatives. If you find several ways to do something: mention more then one. If you publish an alternative for some claim of them you will make their claim rather useless.
- Mention the prior art. It is good scientific practice anyway to do that, but here you may get some additional profit from it.
There is no problem if you publish about something that they have patented. Only when you start using the technology in some productive use will you become liable.
The big question is what you want several years from now. You may be able to establish a lot of prior art for their patents. But patent law is a jungle: if you are not prepared to fight you have no chance. You mention that that company has an agressive patent policy. So you can be sure that they will go to court to protect their patents even if they don't give themselves much of a chance. the only thing that can stop them is when they know that you will fight back and that you have the resources to win. This may mean that you have to look for some big corporation to back you.
If you want to start your own corporation to implement your work you should apply for some patents of your own. Not only will that impress you financial supporters. It will also be essential when dealing with that aggressive company. Without any patent of your own they can stop you with one tiny patent claim of their own. As soon as you have some patents of your own you can stop them too. In that situation you keep each other hostage and can negotiate a reasonable deal.
I would like to see the following improvements:
- if there is prior work the patent should be sent back to the applicant (with a bill) and the applicant should have to reframe the patent so that it does not cover prior work
- The above mentioned bill will not impress corporations but it will stimulate the Patent Offices to search for prior art.
- any time lost due to the fact that the patent had to be rewritten should be subtracted from the duration of the patent. (this will impress the corporations)
C# is a serious competitor for Java. Its designers have looked at Java and tried to make something better. With the advantage of the latest technical insights they surely have a chance to replace Java.
So Java needs to be updated to the newest technical insights. For end users this will make no big difference: the new runtime will know a "compatibility mode" where you can run older versions. Their only problem will be that they hveto download that newest runtime. But I guess that the compiler will have an option to generate code for Java-2 as well.
The real pain will be on the programmers who will have to adapt parts of their program.
From Computer Magazine issue 1-2003 in a test of development environments:
.NET where the EULA had been altered. They saw this as the only way to reduce our legal responsibility.
On advice of our lawyers we acquired an illegal copy of
1. Where is George Bush?
The US government is rather influential in this. I wouldn't be surprised if they had something at stake here too. Otherwise they would have interfered long before.
2. Harass the board with questions please!
Vincent Cerf and some other board members give a lot of public lectures (and probably make a lot of money from it). If they speak near you: go to the lecture and ask the tough questions!
This study is rather predictable. They take comparable symptoms and then ask people if they really thought it comparable.
The real question is what happens in the brain.
Just some suggestions to get started:
- the Japanese study hat was recently quoted here noticed that mainly the frontal lobes got the alpha waves.
- some meditation studies notice that some parts of the brain become quiet while others become more active.
I don't know what to make from that. But I do think that further research should be in that direction.
You surely didn't read the intro of the Ars cookbook: "All recipes are from the member listed, any questions about them should be posted to the specific member. If you wish to have a recipe removed or added to the cookbook simply ask or post on the boards."
That sounds to me as NOT open source.
However, one might start with asking all the contributors if they would like to submit their recipes as open source.
In the "good old days" when Monsanto & Co still developped new varieties by crossing existing varieties they used to sell hybrid seeds that couldn't multiply (the resulting plants were infertile). Why isn't that technique used for GM stuff?
Probably the best would be to integrate such a program into one of the opensource filesharing programs.
It should be optional - of course. But I think it is the only way to get a big enough population of users.
As a independent system administrator I always bought my own parts and either put them myself together or ask the supplier to do this.
The advantages were obvious:
- standard parts: Dell & Co regularly change the hardware inside their pc's without notice. So if you order a second batch of the same computer you are very likely to get something different: not what you want as a system administrator.
- quality: once I found out that a whole shipment of 6 Dells had a defect second IDE port. No problem as it was supplied - but when I added a CD-rom I had to call Dell. There they tried to stonewall me with technical questions - if I hadn't known my stuff I doubt if it would have been repaired. My second experience was with a Dell server. It came pre-installed, but when I wanted to add a harddisk to the RAID I had to reinstall it because they hadn't done it right (yes, they told me to reinstall).
- price vs performance: you can finetune the computer to get optimal price/performance: a cheap video card because an office doesn't need much, more memory because that tends to become the biggest problem in older computers, no scsi, mice and keyboards that you ergonomic people like and your favorite monitor.
A little history: before Microsoft bought Visio Visio sold besides it drawing package also a cheap Autocad clone: Intellicad. At some point they decided to concentrate on the big market of the drawing package and they handed Intellicad to the Intellicad Technology Consortium (ITC). This consortium has developed the product further in a kind of opensource way (although I am not sure whether RMS would agree).
When Microsoft bought Visio Visio had yet another CAD package: ArchT. This is an architectural add-on for Autocad and Intellicad. Microsoft decided to license this to the ITC too and in this way.
However, support for ArchT never came from the ground. The ITC had only a license for Intellicad 2000 while ArchT only worked with Intellicad 98. Nowadays ArchT is nearly invisible on ITC's site. The latest news I could find was that Eagle Point will further develop ArchT.
So to summerize:
- Microsoft only used "opensource" here as a decent way to stop with the support of some software.
- As far as I can see Microsoft didn't make any money from it.
Microsofts strategy is to sell packaged their software in a nice box with a nice and good manual and lots of goodies. For the more complicated products they have made some courses and certificates too.
There is some telephonic support. But that is very basic. There is no such extensive handholding as Oracle does. For that kind of support MS relies on its resellers and other service providers.
Sure MS tries to get more money from consulting. But for now it is insignificant. It is probably the best if it stays that way: otherwise they will be seduced to make their products worse in order to get more consulting.
Most companies that provide opensource products sell them as a kind of loss leaders. They make the money on the support. For a similar strategy to Microsofts only the Linux companies like Redhat and SuSE some in the picture. And even they rely more and more on closed products and consulting.
For these reasons I think that when MS goes opensource it will be with inexpensive products that don't need much support. Preferable there should be some added value from the opening of the source.
My guess: they might do something like ID software does with Doom: giving the source of old versions away and in that way stimulate developpers to develop new ideas.
SACD has been on the market for some time - as has DVD-Audio. Both have a comparable marketshare.
Seems to me that the music industry is shooting itself in the feet with a standards war. This way it may take years before people start buying next generation CDs.
When I was a system administrator most people I worked with used Autocad and as that involves mostly working with the mouse they got their problems from the mouse.
My experiences were:
- there is a psychological part too: the people who ended sick at home were people who had given me the impression before that they were not very happy at their work.
- I had a little collection of different mouses and trackballs. If people had problems they could try them out. If they had a mouse at home that they liked we bought that one.
- a big part of many treatments is making you conscious of what is happening in your body. The thing that impressed me most was some muscle-tension-meter that you put around your arm. If you see that some of your muscles are too tense you are sure to try to relax them.
- the article thinks that it is bad that people have to relearn with a new keyboard. I think it is good. It makes people more conscious of what they are doing.
The main example provided by the Motion Picture Association is a "DVD-R factory" that produced Spider Man and Star Wars copies.
But this is not a factory with professional DVD-burners. This is just a guy who bought 30 DVD-writers at the computer shop around the corner - just as you and I could do. I am afraid that some day we will end with a unique ID on our DVD and CD writers at home just to protect the copyrights.
Just as with the prohibition in the 1930s we have here laws that are far outside acceptance by the general public. All those measures won't stop the main problem (in this case: overpriced CDs) and in fact it only helps the mob.
Content developpers are now coming in the position that inventors have had for a long time: to get maximum profit they need to keep working on it.
Clones and competitors can be a source of innovation without being a real threat if you treat them right. Just look at Microsoft and Apple. In the games world you have ID Software that actually encourages hackers to work on some of its code by releasing old sources.
Blizzard obviously dropped the ball:
- they did not or were slow to copy innovations from BNETD
- they didn't sell servers
- they didn't work out a policy towards BNETD. Now they just want to destroy them and they seem too stupid to realize that they might actually profit if they were a bit more creative.
Sure - there is the problem of the pirated copies that can play on BNETD and not on battle.net. But I doubt whether this is a real problem:
- as we all know many software packages got popular because they tolerated a certain level of pirating.
- Blizzard seemed able to live with piracy until BNETD was modified so that pirated copies of the beta of Warcraft III could be played. But to me the main problem here seems to be a lack of foresight at Blizzard.
- Blizzard has planned an effective remedy with more content on the server. No hacker will match that.
- BNETD is prepared to make include a check for the unique reistration number. I doubt that this will be very effective (it's opensource, so other people will remove it), but it may help a bit.
- if Blizzard picked up the innovations from BNETD faster that would decrease its appeal.
You suggest that giving it opensource will guarantee support. I dont think so. At its best the project will become another unmaintained project at sourceforge. Maybe it will even get on its unmaintained section (http://unmaintained.sourceforge.net/). For your customer this will bring no benefit.
And if your clients competitors get the program and find it useful: do you think they will give something back? Only if they are very moral people. Most people will simply conclude that they have no benefit from giving it back, that you - as copyright holder - won't sue them and that if they would give their code back there would simply be two versions - confusing further users.
Managing an OS project has to be taken serious.
It has always been a pilar of our civilization that ideas can be copied freely.
Sure, to promote people to innovate we have things like patents and copyright. But these give the maker only a temporary rights.
So we should speak about intellectual usufruct, not about intellectual property. To do otherwise is undermining our civilization.
Some URLs: the WIPO essay match was an activity of the WWA (WIPO World Academy). The winners can be found here. As far as I could see they didn't publish the other submissions.
The article doesn't even mention the word safety.
However, my LPG car is not even allowed in parking garages in many countries. Just imagine how they would treat an hydrogen car
Latin America has had a Pax Americana for over a century and it has been a big mess. There is no reason to expect it to become better in the future. To achieve that the US would have to really open its borders - just as the EU does for its new members (and the Romans did in the past) - and I don't expect that to happen.
In a normal economy you need to maintain a certain level of honesty to enable people to produce and trade things. When you have a natural resource like oil you can forget those basics and essentially do what you want. The abuse of power by the Saudi family could not happen if there wasn't the oil.
Foreign intrigants like the CIA like such scenarios. Power abusers like the Saudi's are opportunists who will do whatever it takes to stay in power. That is much preferable above democratic leaders who say that the US stinks because the big majority of the population believes so.
The best the Saudi's could do is not to build advanced industries. They did that in the past. They become white elephants that are very dependent on western technology and expertise and tend to get outdated after a few years. Instead they should focus on products for the local market. However, being a rather small market they will need to cooperate with their neighbours to make that a succes.